The invention features a time-resolved spectroscopic method and apparatus for breast tissue examination.
Breast cancer is among the most common and the most feared malignancies in women. It has an unpredictable course, the treatment is frequently physically and emotionally draining and the risk of metastatic spread persists for many years. Due to its high occurrence rate, routine breast cancer screening, which includes physical examination and x-ray mammography, plays an important role in current health care. X-ray mammography can detect over 90% of all masses and increases the 10-year survival rate to about 95% for patients with cancers solely detected by mammography. Although the modern mammography uses a low-dose of x-rays, it still involves some small risk of inducing cancers by the radiation. Other tests, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and gadolinium enhanced MRI, have been used successfully for detection of breast tumors and may be used routinely for screening in the future.
After a small suspicious mass is detected in the breast non-invasively, an excisional biopsy is usually performed to exclude or diagnose malignancy. The biopsy specimen is removed under local anesthesia and is used for histopathological diagnosis. The statistics show that in about 75% of the excisional biopsies, the biopsied tissue is diagnosed to be benign. Thus, a majority of patients undergoes this unpleasant and costly procedure unnecessarily. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the excisional biopsy may cause spreading of the malignant tumor cells.
Therefore, a non-invasive, relatively inexpensive technique that can detect and characterize breast tumors may find its place in today's health care, alone or in conjunction with the above-mentioned techniques.